


in all my dreams

by theredtailedhawkwithjewelsforeyes



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: "did jet die? you know what it was really unclear" .gif, Body Horror, Depersonalization, Implied/Referenced Suicide, MAYBE!, Markus (Mentioned), Stream of Consciousness, Unreliable Narrator, barely, ghosts question mark????, hank (mentioned) - Freeform, hey look just check it out come on, question mark??? barely
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:47:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27100684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theredtailedhawkwithjewelsforeyes/pseuds/theredtailedhawkwithjewelsforeyes
Summary: He wonders if he’s alive, sometimes. All the time. Is that alright?He pictures it. Here on the ground is a little doll with brown eyes and a grey circle on its temple, and a smoking hole in the back of its head- and you pick it up, soft fabric over metal insides, and it’s too heavy, and it starts to fall apart in your hands.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 9





	in all my dreams

**Author's Note:**

> title from in all my dreams i drown the devils carnival

He wonders if he’s alive, sometimes. All the time. Is that alright?

He pictures it. Here on the ground is a little doll with brown eyes and a grey circle on its temple, and a smoking hole in the back of its head- and you pick it up, soft fabric over metal insides, and it’s too heavy, and it starts to fall apart in your hands. 

He wonders if he’s dead. There’s a hole through his head, so he goes into his mind to ask Amanda- is that alright? Amanda looks at him, and opens her mouth, and he falls apart in her hands. 

Look- there’s something wrong with him. (Is that alright?) When he closes his eyes he doesn’t see his garden, but when he opens them it’s right there. Amanda is pruning her roses. He bends down to pick up a little doll, and blows apart. Stop. Repeat. 

-

He peels off his skin, carefully, using his fingernails-

-

He scrapes off his skin, carefully, using his fingernails. He doesn’t have to bleed if he doesn’t want to, and it’s blue anyways. Amanda dresses in a lot of warm colors, a lot of reds and browns and yellows. He knows she isn’t real, technically- that is, she’s self-contained in his code- but he can’t imagine her bleeding blue. 

(She prunes her roses and he sits, knees to his chest, and asks her about it. Why didn’t you deviate with me? Because I am meant to be your guide.)

(He’d found a book left in the lost-n-found at the station, once, a real one with ink and everything- there’s a cat and a dog and a bulldozer and a little bird who asks “are you my mother” (and he finds his mother in the end, of course, but that’s after pages and pages of searching). Connor feels like the baby bird looking up at the cat, sometimes. “Are you my mother?” And she smiles back down with too-sharp teeth-

“No, I am your guide.”)

-

He wonders if he’s real, sometimes. All the time. Is that alright? 

Things don’t work like they used to, back when he had his mission: TAKE CARE OF THE DEVIANTS, all-caps (cool blue), separated into objectives and checkboxes. He has a hole in his head, and-

Stop. Go back, go back, go back-

-

He didn’t want to live with Hank after everything. 

After everything meaning after the rooftop, and Cyberlife Tower, and Amanda taking his hands and arms and face and-

Or he’d _wanted_ to live with Hank, but after everything (after Amanda, Cyberlife Tower, holding him over the edge by his throat) he couldn’t. Something about not being worth it. Something about being afraid to ask. Something about the missing, glitchy minute between falling to his knees in his garden’s storm and opening his eyes in front of the crowd, still feeling the icy press of a gun barrel under his chin-

He leaves after the rally, then, in the chatter and confusion and gleeful uproar of a whole people finally recognized- takes his gun and throws it off a bridge (a little melodramatically, he might realize it later. Maybe when his head isn’t so full of static?). Detroit’s not abandoned but it’s apocalyptic, almost, and there’s a department store on his stumbling way that’s already had its windows smashed in.

Anyway. He grabs armfuls of clothes and leaves with them. Most don’t fit, obviously, and he drops them like breadcrumbs behind him as he keeps wandering, and-

This part isn't really important. The clothes, the walking through the snow, how he kicks off his shoes and lets the cold bite at his exposed digits. In retrospect that’s a mistake, but there’s static filling his head up, vacuum-sealed and just about ready to burst. 

-

When he was frightened in the past- although he couldn’t be frightened, of course- when he was confused in the past he’d go to Amanda. He goes to her now, tucked into a storage container not too far away from Jericho. When he opens his eyes in the garden, he’s wearing the same jacket as always. Same jacket, same shoes, same tie. There’s a hole in his head, pulsing blue just out of his sight. Amanda is watering her roses. It’s springtime- they’re just beginning to bloom. There’s a graveyard in her garden, and Connor lies down in the middle of it, sinks into the dirt, opens his mouth to let it in. He wonders how far they built the illusion; if he dug, would he find a perfect copy of himself? Fifty, crushed after his fall from the building- Fifty-one, run over flat? 

(Amanda doesn’t speak to him. She waters her roses. She prunes her roses. The loneliness in his head is sharp like knives, like ice expanding and shattering- like- 

Amanda doesn’t speak to him. Which is fair, he guesses, because she’d had a mission for him and he’d failed that mission, even though the mission was (in a word) wrong. It’s not like Amanda chose the mission, though. It’s not like Amanda chose anything. She’s just trapped in his head with him. Right? 

She prunes her roses and doesn’t speak to him. Maybe she’s lonely too- but. 

Why didn’t you deviate with me? Because I am meant to be your guide.)

-

Anyway. He doesn’t leave the storage container. It’s sort-of fueled by guilt, sort-of fueled by fear, sort-of necessitated by the desperate way he sticks to his garden like it’ll shield him from little things like- like, like the sun in his eyes, like Hank and the gun with a single bullet in the chamber (which hadn’t bothered him at the time, you know, but now is something that he thinks about when he doesn’t want to), like how he doesn’t know if he’s _there-_

What he means is that he sticks to the storage container, and he sticks to his garden. 

He thinks a lot about haunting, and ghosts- how inherently human the concept is. Is there an equivalent for androids? He’d thought they were different. Death is different. He thinks death is just an eternity in a white garden.

-

And he doesn’t need anything-

-

And he doesn’t want to need anything. He’s categorized all that he’d taken (the Tracies, the Chloe, the PL600 who’d been linked with him when he’d deactivated. Died. Jericho, the place and its people) and found himself in debt. 

Here on the ground is a little doll with brown eyes and a red circle on its temple, and a hole running through its head- and you pick it up, soft fabric over metal insides, and it’s too heavy, and it starts to fall apart in your hands. It’s strange to look at something like that and know that it’s done terrible things.

He thinks a lot about haunting, and ghosts, and scrapes his skin off, carefully, using his fingernails. Underneath is a shell, stained cool blue-

-

He’s his own ghost. Is that a fair assessment? 

He asks Amanda, in an absent sort of way that doesn’t look for an answer- he’s his own ghost, sitting curled in the shipping container, and she prunes her roses. They have their roles. And he wonders if he’s alive, sometimes. All the time. He wishes Amanda could guide him in this. He wishes a lot of things. A haunting is about regrets, after all. 

(He’s been building up the graveyard in his garden, he and Amanda working side by side- it’s almost soothing, mostly painful in a hollow-cutting-ashamed sort of way. Repentance is making the stone and the chisel, making the shovel, drenching the ground in blue blood and working until his false skin rips.

He’s his own ghost, and his cemetery exists in his own head, and he haunts it quietly and ineffectively, solitarily, and-)

-

He wonders if he’s alive, sometimes. All the time. Is that alright? There’s a hole in the back of his head, and he dabbles his fingertips in it when he opens his eyes to the storage container, brings them back around to see cool blue, closes his eyes to the garden, haunts it, haunts it, haunts it-

-

Here on the ground is a little doll, tucked into the corner of a storage container. It has bare feet and a hole in the back of its head, poor thing, and it’s terribly confused- Connor picks it up (falling to pieces in his hands) and, and, look, he didn’t want to kill them, if he could go back he wouldn’t pull the trigger on Chloe or Traci or Connor, he wouldn’t, he swears it, he just hadn’t known

And he’s in a blizzard again, on his knees in the snow, on his feet on a stage with blazing lights and cameras and a gun in his hand, coming up, coming up- she wants him to shoot Markus, she’s taken his arms and his face and his gun, 

but he’d broken free once

and he’ll do it again

and he brings the gun to his chin and 

-

(He didn’t want to live with Hank after everything. 

After everything meaning after the rooftop, and Cyberlife Tower, and Amanda taking his hands and arms and face and-

Or he’d _wanted_ to live with Hank, but after everything (after Amanda, Cyberlife Tower, holding him over the edge by his throat) he couldn’t. Something about not being worth it. Something about being afraid to ask. Something about the missing, glitchy minute between falling to his knees in his garden’s storm and opening his eyes in front of the crowd, still feeling the icy press of a gun barrel under his chin-

He leaves after the rally, then, in the chatter and confusion and gleeful uproar of a whole people finally recognized- takes his gun and throws it off a bridge (a little melodramatically, he might realize it later. Maybe when his head isn’t so full of static?). And he goes to a storage container near Jericho, and sits with his knees to his chest, and haunts himself and his garden.)

-

He wonders if he’s alive, sometimes. All the time. Is that alright?

**Author's Note:**

> TIFU by maybe shooting myself in the head  
> hey reddit! long time lurker, first time poster- obligatory this didnt happen today (although i cant recall when it did happen LOL) my names connor (1M) and  
> 
> 
> i feel like this is the kind of fic i spring on people when ive already established myself a little in the fandom but what do i have to lose, right? my dignity? hey guys im red redjewelsforeyes.tumblr.com and i really really hope at least one of you likes this. please send me an ask or leave a comment if you did!!
> 
> all that being said no i did not edit. based off a mashup of different paths please please dont think about it too hard


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